One Man Bailed Them Out Again. That's the Problem.
Macklin Celebrini scored twice against Montreal, the second on a power play 2:13 into overtime, and the Sharks walked out of that building 4-3 winners. The skid is over. The reprieve is real. And none of it changes the number that matters most: 3.3 goals allowed per game over the last 10, a figure that represents an improvement from the prior stretch and still signals a defense that cannot carry its share of the load.
I wrote two days ago that the luck was running out. Tuesday night in Montreal was a reminder that luck, when it arrives, wears Celebrini's jersey. He is 73 points in 48 games this season, a production rate that belongs in a different conversation than this team's overall standing warrants. The overtime winner was a power-play goal — meaning San Jose needed a man advantage just to close out a team they should have been able to beat at five-on-five. That detail is not a footnote. It is the story.
The defensive arithmetic has not improved in any structural sense. The offseason was built around blue-line reconstruction — Jacob Trouba signed, acquisitions made, a vision sold — and the back end remains a sieve. Alexander Wennberg is a competent third-line center who has played top-six minutes, and his minus-14 rating is the number that tells you what happens when this team's defensive structure is tested. The losses to Detroit and Toronto before Monday's win were not aberrations. They were the baseline.
What makes this team genuinely difficult to evaluate is that the close-game record — 24-14 in one-goal games — keeps producing moments like Tuesday's overtime winner and temporarily obscuring the structural gap. San Jose is outperforming their Pythagorean expectation by more than five points, which means the standings are a more flattering portrait than the underlying goal data supports. Playoff series do not compress variance the way an 82-game schedule does. Seven games against a disciplined opponent will find the defensive holes that a single overtime goal can paper over.
The Sharks are in the postseason. Celebrini is generational and, when healthy, capable of manufacturing wins from nothing. But my read is this: a team that requires its franchise center to score twice in the same game just to survive a regular-season opponent is not a team with a structural answer to its problems. The Montreal win bought a night's relief. The defense that allowed three goals to the Canadiens will be on the ice in the first round, and no power-play overtime goal changes that.